Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Photographing for the CSNTM in Munich

Yesterday, Dan Wallace and his assistant JD Lemming from Dallas, and M. Fassnacht from Muenster, came to Munich, brought along all their heavy equipment and are busy to photograph about 28 NT manuscripts (mostly minuscules) of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/ .This Library is one of the largest in Germany (about 10 million books; collection of many manuscripts, and about 18,000 incunabula, the largest collection of incunabula in Europe), and one of the most beautiful. This evening, I had the pleasure to take Dan and JD along on a small sightseeing tour including some Munich specialties. After photographing all day, they are working in the evening to shift / convert all the data to hard disks / DVD's etc. It's good to know that soon more high-quality photos will be available for the ongoing task of the full collation of every single manuscript.

I would like to add that the photography at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek that CSNTM undertook was done in conjunction and cooperation with INTF. This seemed to be implied in Martin Heide's note that Martin Fassnach was there. But it wasn't explicit. We also used a Traveller's Companion Copy Stand, invented in Graz, and owned by INTF. We are grateful for INTF's help immense help in this project. We should be able to photograph all of the GNT MSS at the BSB within the next twelve months.